


The first waltz

by PudentillaMcMoany



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell & Related Fandoms, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (TV), Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: F/M, Fairy Tale Elements, Friends to Lovers, Mention of Racism, Slow Dancing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-11
Updated: 2021-02-11
Packaged: 2021-03-17 23:47:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29358975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PudentillaMcMoany/pseuds/PudentillaMcMoany
Summary: Lady Pole lives alone, and is quite content; or is she?
Relationships: Stephen Black/Emma Pole
Comments: 11
Kudos: 7
Collections: JSAMN Valentine's Rarepair Fest!





	The first waltz

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ilthit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ilthit/gifts).



> This was written for Ilthit. I had a lot of fun!  
> My prompt was: _Stephen was supposed to leave England forever, and Emma was supposed to leave Faerie forever, but... they miss one another and can't quite stay away._  
>  I hope I made it justice! They're a wonderful pairing.

_December 1818_

In a great house in the country there lived a lady, alone.

She was of course not _entirely_ alone. For who can truthfully say to be alone when one has as many servants as she had? But she was quite alone. Although she was married, her husband lived in the city and only visited rarely; which suited her well. 

The house was not too close to the village, but close enough that groceries could be easily sent for; it was not too far away from other houses if one wished for company, but far enough to discourage visitors.

The lady had moved there the previous year. At the time her servants had thought this was a fleeting fancy, and that she would soon be bored and flee. Two of her maids, Kate and Daisy, had even hoped for that indeed, for they had relations in London, and fun, and nobody to talk to in the great wintry countryside where they had been dropped.

But the lady had stayed.

In the first months of her inhabitancy, she had scarcely left the grounds of the house. If my readers are perceptive, they will have guessed by now the sort of house this was. The grounds were quite large, at any rate large enough for her not to be exactly a recluse. And yet in the eyes of her neighbours she was to all effects a recluse. They knew that in the first days of her stay she had barely left the house, and that even now that one year had passed, her favourite pastime was to be home and rest.

Her routine was ever-changing, but some activities were constant. She liked to sleep in the big bed in the middle of her big room in the Western side of the house. She would retire at sundown and wake up past midday, and when her maids called on her to serve her breakfast, she would tell them: “Is it not wonderful to _sleep_?” As if this was a novelty. Then she would retire to the library, and read some books. Many a time Kate had found her sat on the windowsill to catch the last light of the day, hunched over a book, laughing or crying! She only read novels and plays, and sometimes poetry, which she would get delivered from the city regularly. She disliked serious books, and fairy-tales.[1]

Often, she would ask for a tub to be drawn in her room, and she would bring along her books and read by the fire, and like that spend a few merry hours. This bathing, which required all manner of labour from the household, was the only activity that might make her maids less than pleased with her, for she was in all other respects a very agreeable mistress. As for the rest of the household, the cook’s only complaint was that she often found the lady in the kitchen, which meant that she would eat of the raw cake batter, for she was fond of sweets of all kinds.

This last thing pleased the household. The lady had been so sickly thin for such a long time throughout a long illness she had suffered that her newly full figure was a welcome sight for all, a sign of her reconstitution.

The lady of the house had little company from her peers, and did not seem to wish for it. On the first months of her stay, her neighbours, few and far between as they were, would call on her- partially out of a desire to pay their respect, but partially, no doubt, out of curiosity. The Lady would never turn them down, ever the gracious host, but she would suffer lamentable headachs, so that the guests, upon seeing her tense face and pale complexion, would never linger long. Curiously, the headachs completely dissipated as soon as the guests were gone, and never manifested when the Lady was visited by her particular friend.

This friend, whom her maids recognised from their London days as Mrs Strange, would visit occasionally. She never stayed more than a couple of weeks, and she never seemed to quite manage to coax Lady Pole, for that is the name of our protagonist, out of the house. That is that they went for walks, which they took when the day was beautiful, as walks were a particular interest of Lady Pole, who even when alone would set out in the morning and have her luncheon brought to her, only to return to the house before supper. But Mrs Strange could never quite convince Lady Pole to come visit her in Shropshire, where she now resided, or even less convince her to visit her own husband, Sir Walter Pole, in London. As for the husband in question, he visited scantly. The two Poles were coolly affectionate to each other, and even when Sir Pole was about they would not spend much time together; which suited both quite well.

\---

While all the above is the preamble to our story, and should be kept in mind as an indication of the character of Lady Pole, our true tale only begins now, on the third day of Christmas.

Imagine a house, bedecked in holly and covered in snow. Warm fires, delicious victuals, all the joys of the season. Conjure a perfect holiday tableau.

Mrs Strange, having no family of her own, and being for all intents and purposes a widow, was visiting Lady Pole. Sat in front of the hearth in the sitting-room, well-dressed and well-fed, they both dozed off companionably with their hands upon their stomachs.

“Do you not find it odd that we never discuss it?”

“Mmh?”

“That we never discuss what happened?”

“No. I do not have a need, really.”

“You do not.”

“…I suppose I could try, if _you_ have a need.”

“I have no need. That is, I have a need. But I have many friends.” Mrs Strange looked in the fire. “Mr Segundus has been quite close to me. But sometimes I wonder whether you should not need to talk. Seen as you seem to see anyone so rarely. You know that I can listen.”

“I know. I am sorry but I cannot. I have just begun,” she said carefully. “To do what I wish. And I shan’t do what I do not wish. And that shall be enough.”

“I understand.” Nodded Mrs Strange.

“You must miss him terribly,” ventured Lady Pole, after a spell. She could not quite conceive how someone could miss her husband, but Mrs Strange again nodded, her gaze fixed unto the fireplace.

Lady Pole kicked off her slippers, wriggling her stockinged toes in front of the fire. “Well for me, I miss you when you are not there, but I never miss anyone else. I am quite content on my own,” she said. But as she said that she found that she was wrong. “Although there might be one person I wish to see,” she murmured, as if to herself. “I suppose I should not mind meeting Mr Black again.”

And as she spoke, she knew that she had spoken truly. As these things go, one can live quite happily not knowing something, with the very thing sitting in one’s stomach. But as soon as they realise, there is no escape: the thing is not any more a vague feeling but a real stirring of the soul. And though they wish to go back to their ignorance, they are hopeless: knowledge gnaws at them and there they return, like the tongue prodding a sore tooth.

For having gone through the same suffering, Mrs Strange understood Lady Pole like no-one else did. But she did not understand her need for solitude; she liked people and her people most of all, her brother with whom she now lived. The one person who would… The one person who _might_ , was Stephen Black.

And thus, she missed him.

The line between blissfully alone and lonely is fine, and Emma Pole had trodden it.

\--

Emma hated magic and magicians. She wanted nothing to do with either, and so it had been for some time.

Needs, however, must.

John Segundus was a bumbling quivering man, but Emma had heard he had become a fine magician, and knew him for a decent man. That sufficed.

Upon writing to him, she found that it took some overcoming of the decent man for the magician to truly shine, but at last, after many reassuring letters that she would not put her life in danger, she obtained what she sought: a simple spell to seek out someone.

That very night in her boudoir, she quartered the water in a silver basin. She found to her surprize that this came easy to her, as a forgotten tune sometimes will form itself into one’s mind years after one has heard it. She had been so fond of fairy-tales once, and fond of magic. Perhaps there was a memory. Or perhaps she had been in a fairy-land for such a long time, that she had absorbed some of the magic. Or perhaps, which made her shudder, it was England itself that had become a fairy-land.

Whatever it was, she found that after a few attempts, and much glancing at Segundus’s letters, she could reasonably look for someone in the four realms of the world. She tried her hand at finding Arabella, successfully located her husband in his study, and at the chime of midnight finally found Stephen Black.

It struck her that nobody must have tried to look for him so far. If they only had, it would have been so easy. He was a King: a whole kingdom revolved around him. She looked again, wondering whether such a person could truly be Stephen Black, if she was not mistaken. But there he was, sat on a throne of silver with ivy climbing about it, under a yellowing oak, wearing a silver crown. He raised a hand, bestowed a command. She could not ear, but she could imagine the gentle voice, the authority that comes from wisdom not fear.

She gazed, she longed; in the end, she found that she was vexed.

She had thought that she would be content with merely knowing that Stephen Black was safe, but now that she had seen him, she wanted to talk to him.

She did not know how to talk to him.

She hesitated.

It was then that Stephen saw her.

He had been leaning towards a man who had a face with many eyes, such as many are seen in Faerie, but suddenly he had stilled. Turning away from the man he had gazed at the ceiling, which was the vantage point that the mirror gave Emma. He raised an eyebrow. Emma gasped. She threw her hands into the water, and splashed it about. The vision went away, leaving her alone in her soaked bedclothes.

After sitting for a while with her hands in her lap, quite sorry for herself, she resolved that no more magic should be endeavoured, and that she should go to bed. There she tossed and turned, burning with humiliation, and then raging at herself, for what was there to be humiliated about? Should she write to Mr Segundus again, informing him of her discovery, so that she could entreat him to… So that she could… What _would_ she do?

As she saw it, two options were in front of her. She could ask Mr Segundus to bring her to Lost-hope, so that she could visit Stephen. But could she face such a loathsome place? She thought that she could, provided that Stephen was there. But how to ask Segundus without betraying…. The thread of her thought unravelled at that, incapable of fathoming what it was that she feared would be betrayed.

Or she could ask Mr Segundus to venture to Lost-hope and fetch Stephen for her, and restore him to England. Surely that was the solution, for Stephen had had friends who missed him and whom he surely missed, and she would restore him to his position, and..! But Stephen had been a servant, and a black man. In Lost-hope he was a king. It would be senselessly cruel to suggest he should relinquish his rightful place, by the look of it a comfortable one, for her sake, to the lowliness of his old station and the scornful looks of many.

So she thought, and tortured herself, and could not resolve what to do.

When she finally fell asleep it was not for long, for it was a terrible night. Thunder shook the windows with tinny noises, rain crashed on the walls like buckets thrown about the house. In her delirium, she thought that within every gust of wind was a creature coming to take her somewhere she would not like, somewhere she would be lonely- not a manageable, civil loneliness such as she felt now, but lonely as she had once been, all alone in the house of Lost-hope. But at least then she had had Stephen Black to commiserate with her; and so perhaps she now felt both sorts of loneliness together, the unsafe loneliness of Lost-hope that she had experience with Stephen and the safe one she felt now, and she was all the more wretched for it.

She covered her head with a pillow, and fell back into a listless sleep.

\-------

Emma made no more attempts to search for Stephen Black, asked no of more magic from Mr Segundus and did not reply to his letter asking her whether her experiment had succeeded. She had been quite happy and she could be so again, and so there was no reason to torture oneself.

Sometimes, however, it is not quite a matter of what one does, but one of what one sets in motion.

One night, or perhaps it is better to say one morning very early, something woke her from her slumber. It was not a sound nor a change of temperature in the room, but it felt like both these things at once. It was as if a smell, the tingle in her feet after a dance. She sat in fear, suddenly reminded of her past life and difficulties, and looked around her. Nothing was amiss. She was in her room, warm, lit by smouldering embers, peaceful. Yet her heart was not at ease. Her hair stood on end not in fear but as if stimulated by a galvanic energy.

She went to open the curtains.

Outside was a carpet of snow. The first lights of day rose to the East, orange, purple, the whole world doused in pink and glinting, the tree trunks outside impossibly dark like pencil sketches, branches bejewelled with ice. Her breath fogged up the glass, and there: was there a figure walking away amidst the whiteness...? Hastily she wiped the window with a sleeve, but the figure was gone.

The sun now shone quite tall on the wintry landscape. She felt that no-one else could see it but her; she felt, impossible as it was, selfish as it was, that this was a gift of the world for her only. Had she woken up later, she would have missed it. Suddenly energised by the beautiful sight, the fear she had feared upon awakening entirely dispelled, she turned to sound the bell so that Kate could fetch her tea.

It was then she saw it.

At the foot of her bed was a gift.

Wrapped in aquamarine silk it was, which fell from it liquidly as she picked it up. It was a book, or better a booklet. Bound in calfskin, scuffed on the margins, pages yellowed by time. She turned it around in her hands. On the frontispiece, in gold, was the title:

_Cardenio_

The book fell to the floor with a thud. She hastily recovered it, placing it again in its silk sleeve and sliding it away from her on the bed. She scooted towards it cautiously, as if the book could spring on her. She picked it back up, made to open it, and placed it back on the bed.

She mistrusted it.

That is to say, she did not mistrust the book. But her lack of mistrust at such an obviously fae event made her rather mistrust herself, making it sensible, instead, to make herself mistrust it. After a short deliberation, with her heart hammering in her chest, she shut the silk-wrapped book in her jewellery-box.

\------

Another day, she was walking along the countryside. The snow had melted to mud, whose top layer the cold wind had frozen, so that, as she walked, it cracked beneath her feet with a satisfying snapping sound. The last sun of the day shone bright above her head; she was warm in her fur-lined cap and all the warmer for walking quickly, revelling in vigorous legs, her steady strong breath which puffed in front of her.

She reached a hillock and gazed at the country beneath her, covering her eyes with a gloved hand and her neck with the folds of her scarf. There was a snap to the wind, reminding her unmistakeably that it was still winter, and yet the length of the day and the songbird in the air already carried a promise of better seasons. These were not the only harbingers of Spring: glancing down, she also saw that flowers grew about her feet.

Curiously she kneeled, thinking the flowers to be the first ones of the year, perhaps snowdrops coaxed out by the sun. However, when she picked one, with half a mind to stick in her lapel, she was surprized: the flower was not a flower at all, but a cluster of small perfect pearls on a gold stem.

She gazed about her: from the wet grass all around peered more of such flowers, some identical to the one she held in her hand and some entirely different, flamboyant ruby poppies and cold sapphire forget-me-nots, perched atop fragile emerald stems or growing from silver nets.

It was a beautiful spectacle, and an uncanny one.

She left the flowers where they were.

She did not wish to leave the flowers there, they were beautiful and precious, displayed exquisite craftsmanship and were her favourite ones besides. But she resolved that it would be more sensible to make herself leave them. After a last longing look, with blood roaring in her ears, she ran down the hillock, and did not look back.

\-----

Occurrences of the sort became habitual to her. One day she would return home and find a bath drawn for her with milk and rose petals, but neither Kate nor Daisy were responsible for it. Another day she would find her favourite cake, a sumptuous Savoy, ready on the kitchen table as if waiting for her. Interrogated about it, the cook would say she had not baked it.

She would not eat of the cake nor take the bath. Not that she did not want them; they were just as she liked them. But she had resolved to be sensible twice before, and persisted in her course.

And then, one evening, she sat in the library.

Emma was resolving. There certainly was something fae about the events of the previous days. She did not like fae things.

She ought to be scared.

She was not.

But as things went with her, and our readers should be acquainted with it by now, she decided to make herself scared because it was the sensible thing to do. She decided that she would write to Segundus, and even, to the purpose, set her little writing-desk and donned her spectacles- a new need of hers. But words would not come, and after much pacing and many ink stains, she deliberated to sit in the armchair for a spell, to look at the rain outside and think.

“A spell” turned into an hour as she fell asleep, lulled by the pitter patter on the window.

But the rain turned to storm.

A flash of lighting, the eerie drum of thunder; suddenly Emma was awake. Alive with the forces of nature, the room itself seemed to have turned into a magic lantern, the wind outside and the flashing light projecting the skeletal forms of trees on the wall so that they in a circle around her, engulfed within the ghostly shapes of curtains. She went to the window and made to shut the drapes. In that moment, a sudden gale blew all the candles: the room fell into dark.

A flash of lighting struck just as Emma secured the bolt, and in the ghastly, greenish light she saw a human form, a man, looking at her through the window.

Emma did not scream but brought a hand to her mouth, tremendously shaking in fear. That was her fortune: it granted her time to truly look at the figure in front of her, and sigh with relief.

“Stephen!” She exclaimed. And whilst in her mind she reasoned whether it would not be more sensible to be wary, her body acted of its own volition. She pried the window open.

“I forgot how to be human,” said the man, as he climbed into the room. Emma shut the window behind him, and looked.

He seemed remarkably human (or perhaps should we say unremarkably so?)

“I saw you,” continued the man, gently brushing her shoulder. “I missed you.”

He wore a black greatcoat, greatly dripping on the floor. Riding boots, although no horse was to be seen, and an old-fashioned tricorn decorated with silver embroidery, which went neatly with his ordered queue of hair. He removed his hat and stood with it under his arm, seemingly uncertain. Emma felt that he wanted to give it to her, so that she could dispose of it. She felt that he was accustomed to being served, and remembered that he was a King. Now Emma risked to blush, for the familiar way in which she had addressed him not one minute ago. She insisted to take his hat and his coat, and then, uncertain as to what to do, placed these on her armchair. As if it was not enough, the magnitude of what he had just said suddenly dawned on her. _He has missed her!_ Again she would have blushed, except that, as she reasoned with herself, he evidently only said those things because he was a different person from the one she had last met, and bolder: a King!

He certainly looked like one.

“Mr Majesty, your grace,” she stammered, which made both her and the King chuckle.

Fine lines crinkled around his kindly eyes, and in those Emma saw the person she had once known, the companion of her misfortune. She invited him to sit in front of the hearth, for he was soaking wet, and without thinking too much she asked him to remove his coat and waistcoat to dry by the fire, for they were fine beyond belief and she would be sad to see them ruined. To this, being a bolder person than the one she had known, the King agreed.

The King, in his shirtsleeves, sat by the fire in front of Emma in her nightshirt. They should be ashamed, but they were not. After all, they had been companions once, and, although she had never seen Stephen Black in such a state of disarray, he had certainly seen her in her nightshirt a number of times. So she resolved once again not to blush.

It did not work very well.

The King caught it and smiled his kind smile, and just like that they were friends again, although, once again but for different reasons, not entirely equals.

There were things they needed to tell each other. We shall not dwell on these. Most of them our readers, if familiar with the press, will already know; others are best left to the dark night and the warmth of the fireplace. The latter kind only interest the people who utter and hear them. What we should relate is that they talked all night, chiefly of things that had passed. That they informed each other of what they did not know yet, and reminded each other of what they both already knew. The latter they mostly remembered the same, but when they did not, they corrected each other, laughingly, lovingly.

I could not tell when, nor could they, but sometime in the midst of their talking, they held hands. It was the King who noticed first. He gazed at Emma, a question in his eyes.

She held his hands more firmly in hers, and his gaze too.

After that, it was a haze.

Emma had never wanted anyone. She was by all means not an ingenue, she knew that people felt desire for others, but the specifics of it had always been a mystery to her. Not that she could not _enjoy_ … But she did not seek anything, want anyone. She had been so sick, and then dead, and then sicker. She had not had time.

But she understood now.

The King’s sleeves were rolled up on his forearms, elegant, glowing golden in the dim light, entirely smooth (her husband had a fuzz of hair on his pasty white arms). Unable to check herself, she traced the line of a vein until the dip of his elbow. All within her was a slackness, or a languor. But it was a tense one, for her heart beat madly.

 _If I don’t have him, I will die_ , she thought.

One hand she insinuated into his sleeve, on the taut warm skin of a bicep. The other she placed on his neck.

The King had been still as a stone throughout her perusal, accepting her touch in an equanimous manner. Only touching his neck she realised the quickness of his heartbeat, his gaze lingering on her mouth and then her chest, with a softness to it. He smelled clean, but he smelled of the moors and he smelled like rain, and when her nose touched him just under his jaw he smelled of milky hot tea, and suddenly she wanted a taste. _I will die_.

She kissed his neck with her open mouth.

The King placed his hand to the small of her back. His opened hand perfectly covered the entire width of it, was cool despite being so near the fireplace, and she could feel that coolness through the muslin of her nightshirt, and it becoming hotter.

She took his face into her shaking hands; they shook with power, not with weakness, when she kissed him, and imagine the relief when he kissed her too! He placed his hands on her hips, pulling her closer so that she could straddle him. This exposed her thighs, which he caressed all the way up to the hips, hiking up her nightgown. Like this, she could look at him from above, interrupting the kiss for a mere moment to look at his face still in her hands. She leaned to kiss him again.

A rooster crowed outside the window.

Rose light filtered beneath the curtains.

“I must go,” said the King. His dark eyes still trained on her, he held her hands together with both of his, kissing them.

He gently lifted Emma from his lap as if she weighed nothing and then down onto the floor, where she flopped. He gracefully stood up. In her confusion, she would not be able to tell exactly what had passed. When she had collected herself again, he had disappeared.

Her head spinning, she walked cautiously to the window. The pink light of dawn flooded into the room, but the King was nowhere to be seen. She turned to the armchair, where his coat and hat should be, but found it covered only in crumpled leaves.

\-----

The following days she looked for the King in her basin, at night. She found him almost immediately each time, but he was always busy, always seemingly intent with this or that audience, which he seemed to endlessly entertain in Lost-hope. The first time she had looked in the basin he had spotted her almost immediately, but it seemed that now he could not, or did not want, to see her.

She was nervous.

She paced.

She should not have looked for him in the first place; he had been beneath her once and was astoundingly above her now.

It was impossible.

She ached for telling someone what had passed, but how could she tell anyone? And to whom besides? Arabella would certainly frown. Her husband would certainly- well, her husband would certainly be silent and polite about this as he was about everything, but he must never know. Mr Segundus would bumble and quiver. And anyway, there was only one person in the whole world with whom she wished to talk to about this, who happened to be the one person who could understand her, and that person was the very one who would not talk to her!

In the following days she determined to forget the sting, as that was, after all, the most sensible course of action. In time she started reading again, taking walks, having her servants draw her baths and even stealing cake batter from Cook. She resolved to be content again, and she did enjoy all these activities- although perhaps she now enjoyed them a bit less.

The January frost melted into February, bringing with it an incessant rain.

On Valentine’s day, once it had become clear that her husband would be held in London all day, the cook had made Emma plum buns. It had been a good day, spent in solitude- finally, perhaps, a content one. For who can be discontent who does not have to meet one’s husband on Valentine’s day, an encounter that would be mildly pleasant but disruptive of one’s routine, and yet still receive his gift, an exquisite length of silk damask to be made into a shawl?

Pondering her outfits and whether a purse could be fashioned of the same cloth, she retired to her room to prepare for dinner. She placed the silk, which she had insisted to carry herself, on her bed. There she beheld another kind of gift.

A hand-held mirror laid on her pillow.

She hesitated. Perhaps it would be sensible to-

“Blast!” She exclaimed. She picked up the mirror and touched a hand to its surface. Immediately the surface blackened and then cleared, and who was on the other side but Stephen Black, the King of Lost-hope?

“Your grace!”

“Come to me.”

It was something like a order. And had it been, perhaps our tale would have a different end.

The King was a king, and that accounted for his commanding tone. But underneath it was a more pleading note. That was what won Emma over. She was not angry. She knew that she could make herself angry, but she decided not to. She nodded.

“I shall fetch you myself. Have you a tall mirror in your room?”

“Right behind me. Next to my dresser.”

“Please don’t move. I am coming.”

And just like that the King disappeared from the mirror.

What to do now? And what to wear? She wrung her hands together. Was she visiting a kingly court? Would she need a court gown? Oh, but she had no court gown here! And besides, how to ask to be dressed in her best finery? Better instead to pray that Daisy, whom she had already called to help prepare, and who was fetching hot water, would not cross paths with the King!

In the end, she had better not fretted. She was still worrying in her muddy clothes when the King arrived to fetch her.

\-----

Suddenly, in a blur of confused magic like a wind, she was swept into Faerie, a willing traveller and not a prisoner for the first time. Oh, but she must hate it still, and Lost-hope most of all!

It was the place of her torture.

But because it had been the place of Stephen’s torture too, he had made it as much unlike it as possible. As she gazed around her she saw that it was clean and beautiful and bright. Even more, where it had been cold and sad, it was now well-ordered, civil: in a word, human.

A thousand candles were lit, casting a warm glow bouncing from the gilded mirrors. A fire roared in the fireplace, and all around her she smelled a calm chamomile smell.

Better yet, they were alone.

When before she had only seen the place buzzing with prisoners and captors in a mad dance, now there was no one else there. It was as big a difference as night and day.

“How do you like my court, lady Pole?” Asked Stephen. He did not look at her as he asked, but at their reflection in the mirror in front of them. She suspected that he was admiring them. Had he grown vain? It was possible. He was more of a fairy each day. But it was justified. He looked dazzling in his kingly finery, the severe cut of his coat contrasting with his sweet smile, the tall collar of his shirt crisp white under sharp cheekbones. And she supposed she looked beautiful _with him_ too, her cheeks rosy with excitement, her eyes keen, small and brightly dressed where he was tall and dark.

She tutted at him. “It is Emma, now, I think. That is if you would wish to call me so.”

“I was Stephen once. I would like to be it again, but only if we can be equals.”

The relief washed on her like a wave. Had she known that she had been so tense? It bubbled out of her in a laugh. “I shall be so honoured!”

She took his hand, and together they walked to the centre of the ballroom (for that is what the room had originally been, and was still), and there they stood in front of one another.

“But pray tell me, what took you so long? And why did you leave so soon that day?”

“You are married.”

“Only in name.”

“Be as it may, I had need of time to deliberate. Sir Walter Pole has been kind to me. ”

“And what did you deliberate?”

“That he was not ever so kind that I should renounce you.”

He took Emma’s hand in his, placing it on his warm cheek with laughter in his eyes.

Right in that moment, faintly but from within the very innards of the room, a music started to play.

So caught up they were in each other that they did not perceive it. When they finally did, they were both were swaying in place, a little, to a waltz.

“Do you hear music?” Emma heard herself say, quite dreamily at that.

“I am sorry this should happen. The room has a mind of its own.”

“It is a ballroom.”

“In name only. I abhor dancing.” Said Stephen. Yet his hand was on her waist.

“I hate it too,” she said. But her hand fell from his cheek to his shoulder.

She now found that, in her haste, she had forgotten to take gloves with her. Her bare hand, even through the wool of Stephen’s coat, felt the texture, the solid warmth of the man under her touch. He squeezed her hip.

She smiled.

“Shall we?”

And for the first time, but not by any means the last, they waltzed together.

[1] For indeed, those had become, since Magic had been revived to the country, one and the same thing.


End file.
